PPB April 2020

she never imagined she’d become so involved in her family’s business. In fact, it was something she hadn’t planned to do. Growing up, Nancy watched as her father shouldered much of the burden of the business and was also her grandfather’s caretaker. As a young woman entering the workforce in the mid-1970s, following the VietnamWar, Nancy pursued opportunities in public relations promoting authors. Her publicity work led her to work for one of the sponsors of the U.S. Open Tennis Tournament, and later sold boxes and series seats for the women’s year-end tennis tournament at Madison Square Garden. Nancy, like her ancestors, was a good salesperson. Her earliest days in sales, she recalls, involved selling the most Girl Scout cookies in her troop and winning awards as a teen for selling the most raffle tickets to raise money for the Association for the Help of Retarded Children in Long Island, New York. But Nancy’s perspective of the industry and her appreciation for her father’s role dramatically changed when she attended her first promotional products trade show in 1980, when PPAI— then Specialty Advertising Association International—held its annual trade show in Dallas. “My father said, ‘Nancy, why don’t you come to a convention in Dallas with me?’” she recalls. Although she was reluctant to tag along, she was pleasantly surprised with the way suppliers responded to her father, and the amount of respect they had for him. “I saw the kind of respect my father got that everybody, I mean everybody, dropped everything to speak to him,” she says. “I saw what my father was telling me: that you can make what you want in this industry. The more time you put in, the more you get out of it.” She then joined her father, working as a salesperson. During her first year, she won an award from Pilgrim Plastics for an unusual promotional giveaway used during conventions. “I didn’t know where I was going to get my first client, so I went back to my second job,” she says, which was the publisher of Body Language and a forthcoming sequel, Sexual Body Language . In preparation for a convention in the publishing industry that catered to librarians, Nancy helped design and customize heat-changing plastic cards, which attendees could touch to reveal how sexually attracted they were to the person holding the card. The cards wound up being a hit at the convention. In 1995, Nancy tried to sell the business—a plan that eventually resulted in her buying out her brother, Bob, and taking over sole ownership. “It was a horrible experience,” she recalls, “but six months later, we were better for it.” Over the years, Nancy has updated Larick Associates, keeping her eye on the pulse of technological advances, both in and out of the industry, and adapting as needed. The company, she says, has its own proprietary software to help with business processes, specifically with tracking orders. And to add to the company’s family heritage, it was Nancy’s stepson, a computer engineer, who developed the software. “We’re invested in the computer world,” she says. Larick Associates has also undergone other changes. In 2003, the company relocated from its office in Manhattan, overlooking Union Square, to a home office in Port Washington. Today, Nancy employs three salespeople and three employees in support roles, and together, they share a casual, laidback workplace environment, where the sound of laughter is frequent. “I’m relaxed. We all like working here,” Nancy says. As for the next 100 years of Larick Associates, its direction remains somewhat of a mystery, which adds an air of excitement for Nancy. “I don’t know what will happen over the next 10 minutes or the next 10 years,” Nancy says, with a chuckle. But whatever direction Larick Associates is headed in, it’ll be followed by a century of colorful sales and marketing strategies, innovative promotions and plenty of satisfied clients. Danielle Renda is associate editor of PPB. A photo taken during a holiday party in 1945, after Nancy's parents, Stuart (pictured left, fourth from front) and Ethel Larick (left, third from front) were married. Emanuel Larick, founder of the business, is pictured left, second from the front. | APRIL 2020 | 19 INNOVATE